Now we've all gone festival crazy, it's just not the same

Saturday 12 August 2006 20.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 12 August 2006 20.01 EDT

Have you been to a music festival this summer? Chances are you have; maybe you've even been to more than one. Ever-burgeoning numbers of people are braving bladder-strain, heatstroke, bad puns on 'Woodstock' and aggressive mobile phone marketing in the name of hearing some live music under an open sky. This summer has seen a mushrooming of festival opportunities (some might call them opportunistic festivals) - from the sizeable (Hi:Fi) to the bijou (The Secret Garden Party). One count placed this year's noisy summer funfest tally at 200, up from 150 last year, and up 2,000 per cent from the distant days when it was just the Cambridge Folk Festival, Glastonbury, Reading, Womad and Monsters of Rock. We have the traditional folk scene to blame for it all originally, what with their long-standing seasonal gatherings and their propensity for sleeping in no-star accommodation, like road-hardened troubadours.

How in Michael Eavis's name has this happened? As with most strange latter-day phenomena, global warming has played its part. The trend for hot, dry summers has slashed the financial and physical risks of staging a festival. As befits a working farm, Glastonbury has had a fallow year in 2006, to give the fields and, you suspect, the residents of Pilton, Somerset, a rest from the walking wasted being incontinent on their gerberas.

Dozens of promoters rushed in to fill the 'Glasters' gap several times over. There have been casualties, of course. The Lost Weekend, staged by the operators of the Lost Vagueness tent at Glastonbury, had to cancel due to poor ticket sales. A number of events - such as the urban, tent-free Wireless 'festival' - have run at less than full capacity. But if the supply of festivals currently outstrips the demand, it does so only fractionally. Contrast this summer with that of 1998, when the Phoenix Festival - a short-lived Glastonbury spoiler plonked on a slab of concrete outside Stratford-upon-Avon - finally threw in the towel. The organisers blamed wet weather, the World Cup and the fact that young people had better things to do than listen to bands all day. It was around the same time that very loud death knells were being sounded for music. The industry was in decline; kids were buying computer games, not CDs.

But people's ears didn't wither up, like unneeded vestigial organs. Music grew into a cultural heavyweight. As the prime concerns of youth - music, getting out of one's gourd - seeped into adulthood, a new marketing niche, 'middle youth', was born. Teenagers on ketamine had their powwows; thirtysomethings on mellow, pre-skunk strains of weed could have theirs. Festival-going became a truly national pastime roughly five years ago, according to Melvin Benn of the Mean Fiddler, organisers of the Carling Weekend and stakeholders in Glastonbury. That's when the BBC started extensive TV and radio coverage of Glastonbury. The mainstream media began taking all this mass outdoor epiphany-chasing seriously around the same time, 'moving Glastonbury, and festivals in general, up a cultural notch'. Benn is convinced that festival-going 'is a genuine piece of British culture' now.

But is the proliferation of al fresco rock festivals worth celebrating? At the risk of sounding ungrateful, we ought to take this efflorescence of outdoor feedback with some caveats. Many of these will be familiar. The cost. The Kafkaesque challenge of getting a ticket at face value. The constipation. Holding it in seems the lesser anguish. The bands. No one seems to bother about the frisson of exclusivity any more; bands do 'the festival circuit'. It was a few years ago now, but I remember with fresh horror the time someone at the V festival tried to sell me a credit card. It wasn't some 'scally', either - the portmanteau term for the criminal element at festivals, no matter what their home town - it was an actual credit card company. It's only got worse since then.

Admittedly, the cry of 'sellout!' must have gone up at Glastonbury the year they stopped handing out all the free milk you could drink. But there is a risk of festivals becoming completely meaningless even as they replicate. The word itself is a case in point. Everything is a 'festival' now. Events, summer fetes, gigs. Wireless wasn't a festival, it was a series of open-air gigs in city parks. Fruitstock wasn't a festival - insofar as an event ending in '-stock' ought to be, at the very least, about bands. Fruitstock was a free summer shindig in London's Regent's Park put on by a smoothie company, with abysmal music.

Festivals cynically exploit the idea that they are countercultural happenings when in fact they have long since been leached of any real force except as another venue for consumer choice. At the nicer upmarket festivals, you can have organic burgers, rather than burger-van burgers. It's civilised, sure - but is this what the hippies risked the brown acid for?

Perhaps most regrettable is the loss of the feeling that festivals are something other than the same as everyday life, except under waterproof nylon. It could be so beautiful, man. We could sorely use something like the Americans' Burning Man festival, where nudity, fire and a kind of mediated anarchy reign (or at least they did before that, too, became gentrified). Instead, we have acres of plastic-backed picnic blankets stretching from the Isle of Wight to Scotland.

All dressed up

In fashion, two starlets turning up to a premiere wearing the same dress is considered a faux pas. In music, two big-name artists releasing albums both heavily inspired by jazz, blues and soul music is more like a trend. Hot on the heels of Christina Aguilera's new album, Back to Basics, which fawningly plundered the greats of the past, is OutKast's latest. Idlewild, a soundtrack to their forthcoming, much-delayed film of the same name, is set in the Jazz Age. Without wishing to impugn either La Aguilera (whose stonking great foghorn of a voice is witness to a genuine love for the old timers) or OutKast, I do wonder whether music's current fling with the early half of the last century has something to do with the dressing-up opportunities, as much as the jazz horns. Back to Basics' booklet features a great many pictures of Christina as a Forties starlet or a burlesque babe. And Andre 3000 hardly needs an excuse to don plus-fours. Perhaps that's why he's not going on OutKast's next tour: all that sweating plays havoc with the hang of one's cravat.